Page 13 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 13/206 Back in the 19th century, if you count the impact of Thomas Malory’s collection of Arthurian lore and legend (Le Morte d’Arthur constantly reprinted from 1485), and Alfred Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, the works of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, the Victorian Fairy Painters, and the success of Grimm’s and Anderson’s collected fairy stories, and on to the 20th century remediation of European folk tales into highly successful animations by Disney, and Stan Lee’s remediation of Myth – and invention of new myth – for Marvel Comics and films, it seems that our primordial narrative culture is still alive and well, and essentially follows the Lord-Parry hypothesis of continual re-interpretation and remediation.
Joseph Campbell in his fourth volume ‘Creative Mythology’ In the 19th and 20th centuries this reiteration and re-interpretation of myth transmuted into into the ‘mythic novels’ - specifically those by Thomas Mann and James Joyce:
“It is amazing, really, to think that in our present world with all it sciences and machines, megalopolitan populations, so different (it would seem) from the God-filled world of the Middle Ages, young people should still exist among us who are facing in their minds seriously, the same adventure as thirteenth-century Gottfried: challenging hell. If one could think of the Western World for a moment in terms not of time but of space; not as changing in time, but as remaining in space, with the men of its various eras, each in his own environment, still there as contemporaries discoursing, one could perhaps pass from one to another in a trackless magic forest, or as in a garden of winding ways and little bridges. The utilisation by Wagner of both Tristan by Gottfried and the majestic Parzival of Gottfried’s leading contemporary, Wolfram von Eschenbach, would suggest perhaps a trail; so also the line, very strong indeed from Gottfried to James Joyce. Then again there is the coincidence (this time of two contemporaries) of James Joyce (1882-1941) and Thomas Mann (1875-1955), proceeding each along his own path, ignoring the other’s work, yet marking in measured pace, the same stages, date by date; as follows....”
Then Campbell compares the earlier work of Mann and Joyce, continuing:
“Next in Ulysses (1922) and The Magic Mountain (1924), two accounts of quests through all the mixed conditions of a modern civilisation for an informing principle substantial to existence, the episodes being rendered in the manner of a naturalistic novel, yet in both works opening backward to reveal mythological analogies: in Joyce’s case, largely by way of Homer, Yeats, Blake, Vico, Dante, and the Roman Catholic Mass, with many echoes more; and in Mann’s, by way of Goethe’s Faust, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, the Venus Mountain of Wagner, and hermetic alchemical lore.
Then, in Finnegan’s Wake (1939) and the tetralogy of Joseph and His Brothers (1933-1943), both novelists dropped completely into the wells and seas of myth, so that whereas in the earlier great novels the mythological themes had resounded as memories and echoes, here mythology itself becomes the text, rendering visions of the mystery of life as different from each other as the brawl at an Irish wake a conducted visit to a museum, yet for all that, of essentially the same stuff. And, as in the Domintilla Catacomb, the composed syncretic imagery broke the hold upon the mind of the ethnic orders, opening back, beyond and within, to their source in elementary ideas, so in these really mighty mythic novels (the greatest, without question, yet produced in our twentieth century), the learnedly structured idiosyncracies conjure, as it were, from the infinite resources of the source abyss of all history itself, intimations in unending abundance of the wonder of one’s own life as Man.” (Joseph Campbell: Creative Mythology 1968 p38-39
Have a look at Campbell’s own A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake (1944-2005, by Joseph Campbell and Henry Morton Robinson; subtitled ‘Unlocking James Joyce’s masterwork’) - as they say in the Foreword: “Here for the first time the complex and amazing narrative of Joyce’s dream saga is laid bare.”